Previous research has suggested that individuals who report higher levels of self-control may also experience less responsively to tempting cues. A new study examined whether the relation between trait self-control and drinking outcomes is mediated by automatic appetitive responses to alcohol cues. Participants (N = 122) were undergraduate college student “drinkers” who had consumed at least one alcohol-containing drink during the past month. Participants completed a series of questionnaires including the following. The Daily Drinking Questionnaire (DDQ) was used to assess the average per-occasion drinking and the frequency of heavy drinking episodes (HDEs) during the past 30 days. The Brief Self-Control Scale (BSCS) was used to assess self-control and the Implicit Association Task (IAT) was used to measure the strength of automatic appetitive responses to alcohol cues. The authors used regression analyses to determine whether self-control predicted the two drinking-related outcomes of interest. Results showed that participants who endorsed more self-control on the BSCS reported less per-occasion drinking (p = 0.005), and fewer HDEs, (p = 0.001), than those with lower self-control. Additionally, both the direct effect of self-control on drinking outcomes and the indirect effect of self-control through automatic alcohol associations were significant, indicating that IAT alcohol-approach scores were partial mediators of both relationships.
Take away: This study found that trait self-control was a significant predictor of drinking outcomes among college student drinkers. In addition, the link between greater self-control and decreased drinking was partially mediated by automatic appetitive responses to alcohol.